19/01/2026
Mark your calendar folks – Lent begins early again this year.
Oh, and if this is seen as a hypocritical act of “posting too early for Lent whilst criticising those who anticipate Christmas too early”, then the comparison simply doesn’t hold. A calendar entry is not a celebration. Knowing when Lent begins is not the same thing as observing it. The season of Lent is a campaign--a battle. You don’t wait until the morning of the exam to study, or until the first shot is fired to prepare for war. Preparation comes before engagement. This is why the Church traditionally announces the date of Easter and the moveable feasts for the coming year at Epiphany: to help the faithful order their lives around the liturgical year, especially for the great campaign of the year, rather than stumble into it unprepared.
Premature Christmas celebration, as practised by the secular world, is not preparation at all. It is celebration, pure and simple. If one genuinely cannot tell the difference between publishing dates and putting up decorations, that isn’t hypocrisy; it is a confusion of categories. If foreknowledge were hypocrisy, then the Church herself would be guilty of it.
